'Cup of TJ': San Francisco woman ditches 9-to-5 to become 'digital nomad'

TJ Lee walks the Salt Flats in Bolivia. Lee quit her tech job and embarked on a journey around the world. Followers can keep up with her travels via social media.

TJ Lee walks the Salt Flats in Bolivia. Lee quit her tech job and embarked on a journey around the world. Followers can keep up with her travels via social media.

Photo: CupofTJ / TJ Lee

Photo: CupofTJ / TJ Lee

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TJ Lee walks the Salt Flats in Bolivia. Lee quit her tech job and embarked on a journey around the world. Followers can keep up with her travels via social media.

TJ Lee walks the Salt Flats in Bolivia. Lee quit her tech job and embarked on a journey around the world. Followers can keep up with her travels via social media.

Photo: CupofTJ / TJ Lee

'Cup of TJ': San Francisco woman ditches 9-to-5 to become 'digital nomad'

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TJ Lee had a good life in San Francisco. A steady income, solid career path and creature comforts. But she gave it all up.

Instead, she decided to explore the world as a "digital nomad." She documents her travels on her YouTube channel "Cup of TJ." There she posts video blogs of the exotic locales she visits while sharing the joys and difficulties of traveling as a solo woman abroad.

"If you have a lifestyle you want to create for yourself, whether that incorporates travel or not, you have to dive in head first and just commit to it," Lee said. "It's going to be super rocky, it's going to take a lot of time, but it's going to be so worth it."

"People see my channel and say 'your channel is about travel,' which is so true," she explained. "But, mostly, it's about having the courage to do what you want to do."

YouTube vlogger TJ Lee recently reflected about her journey. The former Bay Area tech worker followed her dreams to travel the world as a digital nomad.

Media: YouTube / CupofTJ

Born in Taiwan, Lee grew up in Southern California and attended college at UC Davis. Like thousands of college graduates, she moved to San Francisco to enter the tech industry and found a job at Mozilla.

"It was really comfortable," she said about her marketing job at Mozilla. "It was good pay. The team was awesome. I felt like I had a purpose at the company."

But something was missing.

"I felt like it wasn't what I wanted to do," she said. "And now that I was making money I could finally make a choice and finally fund myself and do something fun."

So Lee quit her job and began traveling, hoping to finance her adventures with freelance photography jobs.

Unfortunately, the work wasn't easy to come by.

"I felt like I just didn't know where I was going," she continued. "The lifestyle was cool, and I was having so much fun, but I knew I didn't want to go back to my 9 to 5. It was almost like a survival game," she said, laughing.

During her trip, Lee met "digital nomads" — people who are able to do their profession anywhere in the world that has access to a high-speed internet connection. Many worked out of Southeast Asia where the cost of living is much less.

"When I was working in tech, it was all about getting that raise, getting that bonus, getting that promotion," she said. "When I started traveling and being a creative and working I was like I don't know why I would need so much money anymore. I can sustain on this much, this amount, and I was way happier than I was before."

After networking through the website nomadlist.com, Lee traveled to Chang Mai, Thailand, and its large digital nomad community.

Using her photography and video skills, she was able to make marketable videos for fellow traveling nomads and entrepreneurs.

"Surprisingly a lot of people need that content," Lee said. "Video is so big now, but not everyone knows how to do it."

At the same time she landed a remote part-time job doing social media, brand consulting and marketing for a small agency in the United States.

"I'm kind of going back to what I did before [I traveled], but at least this time it's remote," Lee explained. It also gave her some financial stability to continue to live abroad.

With the extra funds, Lee was able to travel more and dedicate more of her time to her YouTube channel.

"You do something, and you build something up and it's actually going, you're like 'oh my gosh I love doing this,'" she said. "Now I have to really do it and make it work.'"

Before Lee arrives in a country, she researches the places she's going to in order to develop a basic rough script. Her vlogs usually take a whole day of shooting.

"A lot of people don't think its work but you are constantly thinking about what shots to get, what B-roll to get, when to do an introduction and when to tell a fact," she explains. "Now when I vlog nothing is useless footage."

Each video takes about eight or nine hours of editing. Some of her video guides can take up to a week of production.

"It was so random," she said. "You don't know who's watching [on YouTube]. It's kind of great that way."

A recent video about staying at a Taiwanese capsule hotel — a type of hotel that offers small pod rooms that have just enough room to sleep in — collected more than 1.4 million page views.

Lee noticed that a lot of people who watch her videos continue to follow her because they consider her a friend. "You really do get to know a lot of people that watch your videos," she said.

Engaging with her followers via social media helps. "I take a lot of time to read all the comments and respond to them." After being in Vietnam, she had followers on social media vote where she would travel next. They chose the Philippines over Australia.

Followers also contacted Lee to offer tips. One woman offered via Twitter to show her around Cebu, Philippines. They met up, and the woman took Lee to the three best places to try the Filipino delicacy known as 'lechon' (roasted pig) in the city.

"Having a local there is just one of the best things when you are traveling," she explained. "They just know where to go and what to do."

Although Lee has had some incredible highs traveling, she has also encountered some terrifying lows.

At India's Holi festival, one of her female companions was physically accosted and improperly touched. Another time, Lee and her friends were followed back home by a group of men.

"That trip was definitely the most challenging and enlightening," Lee said.

But overall, the multitude of amazing people she has met have changed her life and made her a more tolerant and positive person. "Everyone is living such different lives, at such different income levels and different cultures," she notes. "You see people living on a dollar a day, and they are so happy and so nice and so kind."

Lee recently spent a few months in San Francisco to take some time off from the constant traveling, work on a backlog of travel videos, and explore future travel opportunities.

Although she has made some money from YouTube advertisements, it isn't enough to live off. What YouTube does is help build your brand, she explained. Many YouTube vloggers also have sponsorship. "However, if you do a lot of brand sponsorships, you breach a line of trust with your subscribers," Lee noted. "It's a real delicate balance."

"I always tell my fans you have no idea how much work I have to do in the background to fund this," she said with a laugh.

There is a price to pay for the traveling life. Her friends are preoccupied with careers that she no longer can relate to.

"All of my close friends here still work at a corporate job," said Lee. "They are always talking about jobs and promotions, and I don't even know how to contribute to that conversation."

"To build a fulfilling life, it's about working not necessarily harder but smarter - with more faith than ever before," Lee said before returning to the road. "Work won't feel like work anymore because you'll find the delicate balance between doing what you love and just trying to get by."

Lee traveled to Asia last week and has future plans to visit Germany for Oktoberfest.

"I'm still working now, it just doesn't feel the same as before. I feel wholesome and excited for what's to come. Challenges and all," she said.